Fatal clash of egos

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, November 7, 2002

IT SHOULD never have come to this. Peter Magowan and Dusty Baker should have known better than to let their relationship, spectacularly fruitful for all concerned, explode.

Both are to blame. Baker, loyal to the core with his players, failed to show his employers the same fidelity. Magowan, the ultimate authority, forgot to act like the big boss.

Of the two, Magowan deserves the most heat. His name sits at the top of the masthead, and keeping Baker, or at least keeping open the possibility of keeping Baker, was his responsibility. He made the mistake of not treating Baker the way Baker treated his players.

All Magowan had to do was let the air out of his ego and pump up Baker's. It might have been difficult at times, might have required a thicker skin than most mortals have. But in a business as emotionally driven as professional sports in this millennium, bosses have to keep the talent happy and motivated.

For Baker, that meant mediating incipient warfare in the clubhouse, preventing two of the most temperamental stars in baseball, Jeff Kent and Barry Bonds, from embittering the whole roster.

In Kent's case, it's worth noting that he never played close to his potential until he came to San Francisco. His intensity, borderline maniacal, would bedevil most managers. Baker, for the most part, seemed to appreciate Kent's ferociously competitive nature and forget about the other stuff. With Bonds, the manager must have been forced to shelve his ego a million times a summer.

That's what bosses in creative enterprises do. It was what Magowan needed to do with Baker -- dole out praise, indulge, acknowledge him as a star.

Baker has pointed out that he was a child of the '60s, disinclined to genuflect to authority figures. But his problems with Magowan probably went deeper than that. Baker is a baseball man, through and through, a success as a manager and a clutch-hitting outfielder. He was never going to be an eternally grateful company man.

Neither were Lou Piniella and Art Howe, both of whom recently walked away from managing jobs where they felt at odds with the front office. All of them played ball, and they played it well. They knew what it meant to be the center of attention, the guy with the bat in hand and the game on the line.

They also know what it was like to play baseball when owners didn't dole out seven-figure contracts. They were part of the strike in 1981, when the labor war wasn't waged between millionaires and billionaires. They made decent money, but the owners didn't begin to pay players what they were really worth to the game.

With that background, Baker was almost destined to conflict with an owner who craves recognition, who doesn't just sign the checks and disappear. Actually, most coaches and managers chafe when owners hike up their own profiles. That's why Baker isn't the only professional one of recent vintage to leave a team immediately after taking it to the championship round. (See Bill Parcells vs. Bob Kraft in New England, Phil Jackson vs. the Jerrys, Reinsdorf and Krause, in Chicago.)

Baker's ego clash was a little different. Parcells and Jackson were indignant. Baker said he felt wounded. In his mind, he was pushed toward disloyalty. Magowan made it implicitly clear that he thought Baker received too much credit for the Giants' success.

The truth is that Baker didn't take the credit, at least not in the beginning. It was given to him. Many, many members of the media held him in the highest esteem. He was quotable, folksy, philosophical. Most of all, he was charismatic.

In a region that has seen its share of alpha personalities, from Bill Walsh to Tony La Russa, Baker topped them all. He had the obvious charm of Steve Mariucci and the quirky appeal of a Jon Gruden. He had whatever it is that makes a leader. Magowan saw that 10 years ago, when he hired Baker, and he should have seen it now.

Yes, Baker had some thin skin, and he got worked up over slights that should have been invisible to a man of his stature. Talk-radio nonsense should have bounced off him. One can only wonder how he will cope if he ends up in Chicago, where the criticism comes twice as fast and five times as hard. He may realize he didn't have it that bad in San Francisco, at least not with the fans and the media, most of which remained smitten with him long after the honeymoon ended.

But Magowan was the one who was supposed to to make it all work, to see the big picture, to be the ultimate grown-up. He has accomplished so much as the Giants' owner, chiefly building that impossible dream of a ballpark on Third Street.

He was the Ted Williams of owners, forever hitting the ball on the nose. With the Baker negotiations, he finally whiffed in the clutch, and he did it on what looked like a fat pitch down the middle.